Abstract In March 1833 Charles Darwin discovered Devonian fossils in the Falkland Islands. He was excited by his find but could have had little premonition of the long-running geological controversy that he was initiating. Darwin's fossils matched a coeval South African fauna and, as further collections were made, the association was apparently strengthened. A particularly important contribution arose around 1910 through collaborations between a local collector, Constance Allardyce, and professional palaeontologists: Ernest Schwarz in South Africa and John Clarke in the USA. The accumulating evidence was seized upon by the early proponents of ‘displacement theory’ – continental drift – notably Alexander Du Toit, who relocated the Falkland Islands northward for his 1927 South Atlantic reconstruction. A more radical, but geologically sounder proposal arose in 1952 when Ray Adie suggested that the Falkland Islands, rotated through 180°, had originated as the eastward culmination of the Cape Fold Belt and Karoo Basin. In effect, Adie had presciently described a rotated microplate, perhaps the first on record. An opposing view saw the Falkland Islands as part of a fixed, South American promontory, and argument around these two contrasting interpretations of South Atlantic geology continues to the present day.